war and peace
by
Douglas Messerli
Marguerite
Duras (writer), Alain Resnais (director) Hiroshima
mon amour (二十四時間の情事)
Nijūyojikan'nojōji /
1959
He was ready to abandon the project,
until the producers suggested that he link up with French playwright, novelist,
and screenwriter Françoise Sagan. When she also turned down the project,
Resnais was prepared to abandon it. However, an editor and friend of his from Night and Fog, who knew Marguerite
Duras, suggested he meet with her, and, after the coincidence of a long tea,
the two plotted how they might turn the documentary into a fictional film that
would speak far more deeply upon the subject.
By
embedding the absolutely painful photos and films of the nuclear destruction of
the Japanese city within a larger story of woman who falls in love with a
Japanese survivor—while she herself has previously survived being branded as a
traitor in her home city of Nevers, France for having fallen in love with a
German soldier during World War II—Resnais and Duras have created tale that tells us
not just about the horror of the US bombing, but of the horrors of war itself, while
presenting us in very specific terms of the lasting scars war has on all of its
survivors, let alone the people it has brutally destroyed.
Resnais, in short, combined genres, film
documentation and narrative story-telling, to create something that in 1959 no one
might quite expect, using images of horror and lovemaking simultaneously to
interlink death with love, terror with pleasure.
Yet, this couple is already doomed, even
before they meet. Both are happily married, despite their morally “dubious”
pasts, and both have lived their lives through the only way they know how, by
lying or simply not admitting to their own atrocities, which, after all, was
based on their own needs for love or, as the Riva character admits, a
“dime-store” notion of love. Isn’t heroic commitment to one’s country also a
“dime-store” notion of patriotism?
Most importantly Resnais reveals what
might have been a slightly melodramatic story not with narrative pathos, but
with disparate images, easily eliding the ancient city of Nevers (and even
playing, without saying it, on the English-language reading of that
city’s name) with the contemporary Hiroshima, which despite its horrors, has
seemingly survived. Through a beautiful musical score by Georges Delerue and
Giovanni Fusco, and departmentalized cinematography by Michio Takahashi (for
the Japanese settings) and Sacha Vierny (for the French), the film is a truly
interlinked production, which helps us to understand these two disparate beings
as individuals caught, temporarily, under the same umbrella—despite the fact
that they both are rained upon.
Given the director’s own commitment to
the remembrance (and ultimate forgetting) of the past, these characters also
recognize in their love for one another that they themselves are, in their
relationship, both remembering and trying to forget one another. Everything in
this beautiful film is about dualities: “You’re destroying me,” muses “She,”
before saying, “You’re good for me.” The “He” figure recognizes that he will
“remember her as the symbol of love’s forgetfulness.” As if to seal their
fates, they drop into a Hiroshima bar named Casablanca, calling up the famed
Rick’s American Café of World War II Morocco, which ends in the lover flying
away with another.
Both know that their two-day fling can
only result in opening old wounds that will further complicate their lives. But
they cannot resist themselves, each exposing the other to the immense pains
which they have had to suffer, and telling stories which will perhaps help to
erase their pasts—or maybe even imbue their personal memories.
That the great director Resnais was able
to say all of this at age 37 is astounding. And seeing the movie, after all
these years, again today, I was startled by the importance of this 1959 film,
of which Eric Rohmer wrote: "I
think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know
whether Hiroshima mon amour was the
most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” 57 years later, I think we can safely say
that, if it was not the most
important, it was certainly one of the most significant films of its time, and
one that has clearly held up as a masterwork over all these years.
Los Angeles,
November 18, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment